In his statements Jack had voluntarily made the point that when he’d spotted his father’s tracks he’d both fol owed and avoided them, even careful y skirting round the broad mark where the slip had occurred. He had instinctively not walked through them, not out of forensic considerations, but because, as he failed real y to convey clearly but as his listeners may have grasped, they were the last footsteps his father had taken.
Of course, this meant that the descending pair of tracks might have given the appearance that the two men had walked down together. There was certainly only one set of ascending tracks. But al this was neither here nor there, since by dawn and even by the time Jack made his phone cal —he’d delayed the cal because of the state he was in, but also because he knew not much could practicably be done while it was stil dark—a change in the weather occurred. A breeze got up, bringing in cloud cover, and the air warmed appreciably.
By the time the two policemen arrived and descended the field with Jack—who was clearly dreading what he would have to see in daylight—the sharp night had turned into a grey, gusty morning. The top branches of the oak tree made a continual whirring above them, and dislodged leaves spun down. The frost had gone. There was even a touch of drizzle. So the policemen perhaps wondered why Jack had needed to speak about the tracks he’d seen by torchlight that were no longer there—unless, of course, it was simply because he couldn’t help reliving, and reliving again, every detail. Both officers were not unused to this. It was strange how the silent ones could suddenly become the gushers, while the regular gabblers could lose their voices.
But what both officers had mostly thought was: What must it have been like, to shine a torch on that?
The frost was there, anyway, when Jack first walked down, and would have sufficiently reflected the moonlight to make the torch barely necessary. The dark mass of the oak tree, against the ghostly silver of the field and the woods beyond, would have been visible of itself, Jack knew, to his father, who’d carried no torch. Perhaps his father had calculated even this, had waited for the moon to rise and light him. He would have been able to take a final look around. He would have been able, when it came to things closer to hand, to make out the roots under the tree and the gun he was holding: its dul metal glint and his own fingers on it.
Michael sat down at the foot of the oak. There was a sort of bowl in one of the thickest roots, close up to the trunk, which was ideal for this. He took his donkey jacket off first, despite the cold, the better perhaps to manipulate the gun, but also to spread under him before he sat. This precaution was as strange as it was naturaclass="underline" he’d wanted to spare his arse, already damp maybe, from any chil y hardness. It was like that extra blanket on the bed, though Jack didn’t say this. Nor did Jack express to anyone his private view that his father would have removed his jacket so as to be better able to feel, through his remaining layers, the wrinkled bark and supporting, towering, centuries-old solidity of the tree against his back.
Michael had removed his cap as wel , as if out of respect for something. He would have pressed the back of his head, too, against the trunk and its slight inward slope. This might have been mechanical y necessary, but Jack had no doubt either, though he didn’t say it (wasn’t it plain—why had Michael gone to this spot at al ?), that this was out of the same dominant motive. His father had simply wanted to press his head, his skul and his back hard against that oak tree and feel it pushing back. Spine against spine.
Jack knew—he knew it from climbing up the track in winter to get the school bus—that when you shine a torch at night it lights your way but makes the surrounding darkness several times darker. When he arrived beneath the tree he partly wished he hadn’t brought a torch. It made the scene look like something horribly staged just to be lit up and it made everything else, despite the moonlight, pitch-black.
Though Jack was technical y prepared for what he would find, this had not made the discovery any less shocking, and how to describe what he’d felt at this moment was beyond him. Though he’d walked downhil —perhaps it was more of a scramble—he was panting for breath and his heart was banging inside him. Perhaps it was because of this that he’d reached out to feel for his father’s heart, as if while one heart was beating so violently another could surely not be lifeless. To touch his father’s breast certainly made more sense, in any case, than to touch any part of what was left of his head.
Thus he’d felt the smal , hard object in his father’s shirt pocket and known exactly what it was. He didn’t dare remove it. Why should he have removed it? He was overcome by conflicting instincts, to touch and not to touch.
In its recoil, the gun had jumped from between his father’s lips and from his fingers so that its double barrel lay now aimed at his waist. Even before stooping to feel his father’s chest, Jack had automatical y removed the gun, as if Michael was stil in danger.
This was al wrong perhaps, he should have touched nothing, but it was what he did. He hadn’t known if his father had loaded—or used—both barrels or if there was stil a cartridge in place. He didn’t know if he should have broken open the gun to check. Or indeed if he should have carried the gun back with him to the safety (though that was a strange idea) of the farmhouse. Normal procedure had been suspended. You didn’t ordinarily leave a gun, especial y one that might stil be loaded, in the middle of a field, even if it was the smal hours of the night. You didn’t normal y leave your father in a similar position. In any case, he moved the gun from where it had fal en and placed it to one side in a cleft between the roots. Then, after feeling his father’s inert and medal ed chest, he just stood—he couldn’t have said for how long—over the body.
He couldn’t have described his feelings at this time, but anger must have been part of them—a very large part of them—since, though this had no place at al in his subsequent relation of events, what he began to say, aloud and more than once in the middle of a dark field to his dead father, was: “You bastard. You bastard.” Even as he shone a torch on his father’s shattered features: “You bastard.” He would never remember how many times he said it, he wasn’t counting, but he couldn’t stop saying it. “You bastard.
You bastard.”
It was the wrong word, perhaps, since it’s not a word you use of your father or of any father, it’s a word that works in the other direction, but he kept saying it, and the more he said it, the more it seemed not just an angry word but a useful, even encouraging word in the circumstances—the sort of word you might use to someone who wasn’t dead but just in a precarious situation, to help them pul through it.
“You bastard.” It kept coming to his mouth like a chant or some regular convulsion, like the only word he might ever say again.
He was saying it when, after standing for however long it was, he actual y sat down beside his father, his own back against the tree—it was easily broad enough—and wondered if he shouldn’t stay there with him, freezing as it was, at least until dawn, or if he should take the donkey jacket from under him and wrap it round him, or—since that would have its problems—if he shouldn’t take off his own jacket and wrap it round him. “You bastard. You bastard.” He was saying it when he wondered whether to pick up the gun or leave it where it was. He was saying it, at intervals, when after deciding to leave the gun—it seemed to belong there—he made the climb back up the steepening field to the farmhouse, his breath coming like the strokes of a saw through his chest: “You bastard.” He was saying it as the farmhouse and the lights he’d left on rose monstrously over the hump of the field above him, and as he passed by the Smal Barn into the yard. By now it had become like some hoarsely uttered password. “You bastard.”